A reader writes: “I think I have been a regular reader since day one, but I just wanted to tell you guys that The Awl keeps getting better and better. Did Choire and Balk leave? Seriously, thanks guys and I hope you make some money soon.”

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” [Neel] Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank [Paulson] shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.” Well. Ain’t that grand.

“Monkeys can recognize photographs of other monkeys they know, proving that they can both detect differences in faces and figure out if they’ve seen them before, researchers report.” Soon they will be sexting!

Where did Jesus turn up this year? The folks at Buzzfeed break it down for you. (I thought I saw an image of Our Savior appear on the table in the Awl’s newsroom the other day, but it turned out to be a piece of a seriously decomposed croissant that Choire never bothered to clean up.)

A sweary John McCain told Don Imus that he’s madder than he’s ever been, which, for a guy with rage issues, has got to be plenty mad. Maybe Cindy should stay at one of the other houses tonight.

The best part of this is that the “celeb” whose naked pictures prompted the question in the first place turns out to be the cocktail waitress who allegedly banged a Famous Golfer. It is indeed a brave new world.

Paula Hawkins, “the first woman senator elected from the South and the first woman from any state elected to a full Senate term who was not the wife or daughter of a politician,” has died at the age of 82. A Florida Republican, Hawkins was elected in 1980 and served one term.

In these times, one is tempted by all sorts of income streams. So it’s useful, in comparing your value in the market, to know how much a porn publisher would pay a minor celebrity to “masturbate on camera to completion.” (Prepositions are weird, right?) Above the Law provides the contracts from gay porn house Corbin Fisher.

“Sen. Hiram Monserrate has been sentenced to three years of probation and one year of counseling for his misdemeanor conviction of assaulting his girlfriend with a broken glass, reports a Monserrate aide who was in the courtroom to hear the judge’s decision.” Unfortunately for Monserrate, the judge left in place an order of protection which prevents him from seeing the woman, whom he wants to marry. And everyone knows how painful it is when you’re told you can’t wed the person you love, right?

Meet Ryan Kane! Ryan, from Oxfordshire, has earned the distinction of being the first person in England and Wales to be banned from drinking alcohol. Apparently the truculent type, Kane had already been barred from entering local pubs for three years, but violated the order more than 40 times. For the next two years, “Kane is prohibited from entering pubs or clubs, buying alcohol from any licensed premises, being involved in anti-social behaviour while under the influence of alcohol or having unsealed alcohol containers in any public place in Banbury.” Ha! He lives in a place called Banbury! Maybe they should just get him a SCRAM.